Backflips are easy, stairs are hard: Robots still struggle with simple human movements, experts say

Whether it’s running down a track, doing a backflip, dancing to music, or kickboxing, there are more and more videos of humanoid robots doing increasingly impressive things.

Yet speakers at the Fortune Brainstorm AI conference on Tuesday warned against getting too dazzled by the acrobatic feats. A robot doing a backflip–something difficult for a person–looks impressive. But ask a robot to perform seemingly easy tasks, say, climbing up stairs or grabbing a glass of water, and many of todays droids still struggle.

“What looks hard is easy, but what looks easy is really hard,” Stephanie Zhan, a partner at Sequoia Capital, explained, paraphrasing an observation from computer scientist Hans Moravec. In the late Eighties, Moravec and other computer scientists noted that it was easier for computers to perform well on tests of intelligence, yet failed at tasks that even young children could do.

Deepak Pathak, CEO of robotics startup Skild AI, explained that robots, and computers in general, were good at doing complex tasks when operating in a controlled environment. Showing a video of a Skild robot skipping down a sidewalk, Pathak noted that “apart from the ground, the robot is not interacting with anything.”

Yet for tasks like picking up a bottle or walking up stairs, a person is using vision to “continuously correct” what he or she is doing, Pathak explains. “That ...